Metropolitan Pitirim

Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk and Yuryev, who has died aged 77, was not a popular figure within the Russian Orthodox Church. As the head of the only publishing house within one of the world's largest churches, and the employer of 270 people, in more than 30 years he printed only a few thousand bibles, a handful of theological tomes and an official gazette.

When, after many silent decades, the Russian Orthodox Church could finally express its views in public - during the 1988 celebration of 1,000 years of Christianity in Russia - Pitirim's lack of activity became a matter for open criticism, most especially during the sobor (council) summoned in June to mark the anniversary.

A fellow metropolitan, Vladimir of Rostov and Novocherkassk, riveted his audience with a number of criticisms; one of the strongest concerned the publishing department. Not even enough bibles had been printed, he said, continuing: "We are entitled to expect more in-depth reflection of church life with its real problems in the pages of church periodicals."

These words may now seem mild enough, but at the time they were unprecedented. They said out loud what everyone knew but no one dared express. Metropolitan Pitirim continued in his job, which perfectly illustrates the conservatism of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Pitirim was born Konstantin Vladimirovich Nechaev in the central Russian railway city of Michurinsk. His father was a priest, and faced the full onslaught of Soviet atheism while bringing up his 11 children. Konstantin was the youngest, and the only one to enter the priesthood; his siblings mainly became engineers, with one sister going into architecture. He was just old enough to benefit from the limited resumption of theological training after the second world war, and the reopening of a handful of monasteries.

He took the monastic name Pitirim and was ready, like his more promising contemporaries, to fill the many gaps in the episcopal ranks left after the purges. He was consecrated bishop in 1963 at the age of 37, archbishop in 1971 and metropolitan in 1986. All the time, his titular see was at Volokolamsk, a small town west of Moscow with a once-great monastery, which Stalin had destroyed before the Nazis devastated the region during the war.

The focus of Metropolitan Pitirim's activity was not in Volokolamsk but in Moscow itself, for the church publishing house was based at the city's Novodevichi monastery (the actual printing was done on state presses). He became chairman of the publishing department in 1962 and, with his large staff, had considerable freedom to travel abroad, participating in a variety of ecumenical events under the aegis of the World Council of Churches.

But it is for his tireless propaganda work that he will be principally remembered. Not only did he consistently deny the fact of religious persecution, he slandered individual churchmen and human rights activists who stood up for religious liberty against the policies of the state.

He is on record as having criticised Patriarch Tikhon, the greatest martyr of the early Soviet period, for his "hostility to socialism", the dissident writer Andrei Sakharov for the "mistake of creating conflict" with the Soviet state, and - perhaps most damaging of all - justifying the KGB's campaign against the outspoken "dissident" priests Dmitri Dudko and Gleb Yakunin. In 1979, he claimed the latter had been detained for criminal "speculation in icons", a slander that paved the way for Yakunin's 10-year sentence to imprisonment and internal exile.

Yet there was a more positive side to Metropolitan Pitirim. He was companionable, lived modestly and devotedly looked after an invalid sister. From 1988, he was the leading churchman to promote ecological concerns in Russia. After 1989, when the devastated monastery of Volokolamsk, founded by St Joseph in the 15th century, was returned to the church, Pitirim oversaw the major rebuilding programme that restored its departed glory.

· Konstantin Vladimirovich Nechaev, Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk and Yuryev, prelate, born January 8 1926; died November 4 2003